Counter-advertising may reduce parent's susceptibility to front-of-package promotions on unhealthy foods

Abstract

Objective: Assess the effect of counter-advertisements on parents' appraisals of unhealthy foods featuring front-of-package promotions (FOPPs).

Design: A 2 × 2 × 5 between-subjects Web-based experiment. Parents were randomly shown an advertisement (counter-advertisement challenging FOPP/control advertisement) and then a pair of food products from the same category: an unhealthy product featuring an FOPP (nutrient content claim/sports celebrity endorsement) and a healthier control product with no FOPP.

Setting: Australia.

Participants: A total of 1,269 Australian-based parents of children aged 5-12 years recruited from an online panel.

Main outcome measures: Parents nominated which product they would prefer to buy and which they thought was healthier, then rated the unhealthy product and FOPP on various characteristics.

Analysis: Differences between advertisement conditions were assessed using logistic regression (product choice tasks) and analysis of variance tests (ratings of unhealthy product and FOPP).

Results: Compared with parents who saw a control advertisement, parents who saw a counter-advertisement perceived unhealthy products featuring FOPPs as less healthy, expressed weaker intentions for buying such products, and were more likely to read the nutrition facts panel before nominating choices (all P < .001).

Conclusions and implications: Counter-advertising may help reduce the misleading influence of unhealthy food marketing and improve the accuracy of parents' evaluations of how nutritious promoted food products are.

Keywords: advertising; front-of-package labeling; front-of-package promotions; marketing; nutrition; parents.